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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24843850">On Grief and Rubik's Cubes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/hvllanders/pseuds/hvllanders'>hvllanders</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 06:13:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,414</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24843850</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/hvllanders/pseuds/hvllanders</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite the cataclysmic repercussions of half the world reappearing all at once, Father’s Day comes as it usually does. On an ordinary day in June.</p>
<p>Peter struggles to reconcile his grief over Tony's death with his worries of overstepping emotional boundaries. Is there more than one way to be a father?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ben Parker &amp; Peter Parker, Peter Parker &amp; Tony Stark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>On Grief and Rubik's Cubes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was a strange time to be alive.</p>
<p>The world was rebuilding; stumbling off the ground like a baby animal, blinking into a new day. It was joy mixed with sheer devastation. Elation hand-in-hand with destruction. Miracles and chaos. The Fallen un-dusted back to life, granted a Jesus-like resurrection. The world still in ruins, unsure of how to pick itself up from a miracle placed on rubble. Spectacularly confusing. Everyone wanted to go back to ‘before,’ to how things used to be, but no one was quite sure what that meant. There was the ‘before’ of the second snap, when the world was half-awake, when the lights were out, when the cities lay in various stages of destruction. But there was also the ‘before’ of all of it, before Thanos, before Sokovia, before the aliens. Before the Avengers. “I wish the world was like before,” was such a tenuous statement. A desire for normalcy, though no one could articulate just what normalcy had looked like.</p>
<p>And yet, despite the confusion, the chaos, the cataclysmic repercussions of half the world reappearing all at once, Father’s Day came as it usually did. On an ordinary day in June.</p>
<p>May gave Peter a hurried kiss as she left for work. “You check out your iPad thing yet? You know Happy dropped that off for you, right?”</p>
<p>“StarkPad,” he corrected absentmindedly, picking at his eggs. “And no.”</p>
<p>“Happy made it seem like it was important to Tony that you had it.” She pushed salt and pepper towards him before throwing her hair up in a bun.</p>
<p>“I know.”</p>
<p>“Okay.” His voice must have betrayed his feelings because her eyes softened, and she pressed another kiss to his forehead. “I love you, baby. When I get home tonight, we can eat pizza and watch some romcoms, okay?”</p>
<p>He nodded, and then she was gone. She’d left money on the table for him to take the train. He wasn’t one to visit graves, but today was different.</p>
<p>It was less principle and more practical execution. He wasn’t opposed to graves or to visiting graveyards. They didn’t creep him out or make him overly sad. They even appealed to his logical side, because it made sense humans would want a designated place for their mourning. Dying was an unknown art, and even if there was some afterlife the person had gone to, they were still lost to those left behind. They were no longer on Earth. So, a grave was a tangible place to go, the last place they had gone, where they would always be, and, yet, where they weren’t.</p>
<p>He went every year and brought some flowers. Threw away the ones he had left for Mother’s Day, now wilted and wind-swept, and placed a new bouquet at the headstone. May and Ben had taken him when he was little, and now he came on his own. He didn’t know what kind of flowers his father had liked, or if he would have even wanted flowers, but it felt right. Very human of him, to visit his father’s gravestone on Father’s Day. Pay respects. It seemed even more important this year to do something the living would do. He had, not so long ago, been as lost to the world as those remembered here. He needed to remember he was alive.</p>
<p>He stood and looked down at the grave, placing the flowers down in the grass. The stone was beginning to look weathered. To Peter, he had only been dead for eleven years. But, in the grander scheme of the world, it had been more like sixteen. It felt odd, staring down at the etched letters, knowing he had missed five years worth of Father’s Days. He tried to visualize what his dad would have looked like, standing before him, picking up the flowers. It shouldn’t be that hard; he had seen pictures, watched the few home videos May and Ben had in their possession. Would his dad look proud of him? Would he have that hungry gleam in his eye, the one May had, the one all the people the Fallen had left behind looked at him with? Would he be tired? Happy? But he couldn’t conjure up any semblance of his father, past or present.</p>
<p>He usually didn’t talk. But today, on a June morning while the rest of the world was just beginning to wake up from a five-year long nightmare, words rose to his lips. “Would you have been jealous?”</p>
<p>Birds whistled and leaves whispered in the oak tree nearby, but the grave stayed silent. He missed his father in the way one misses the train. Late by one minute, just enough to watch it zoom away. Close enough to catch a glimpse, far enough to not really see it, feel it, figure out where it could have taken you. A flash, a breeze, a life flying by, just out of reach. Untouchable.</p>
<p>He didn’t go to Ben’s headstone.</p>
<p>Something in him was repulsed by the thought of a place that was Ben but not really Ben. Bones decomposing somewhere, a place marked, but not truly him. He took the train back to the apartment.</p>
<p>For once, the neighbors weren’t blasting their music, and the place was truly silent. Peter crept to his room, not sure why he felt the need to stay quiet too. Only that there was something swirling inside of him, some strange emotion he didn’t know how to untangle. He yanked a box from his closet, thumping it down on his bed. He used to pull it out a lot. At first, there were lots of anniversaries. One week since his death. Three months. One year. His birthday. Father’s Day. Grief was a finicky thing. It didn’t go away or lessen with time, it just changed. Years later, looking at a box of Ben’s things, the loss was keen but different.</p>
<p>He missed Ben in the way one misses a limb. The rabid, white hot pain of having something ripped from your body. The ghostly presence of going to lean on something, forgetting it isn’t there anymore. The phantom pains sneaking up on you at night, just when you thought you’d adjusted. There had been no return from losing Ben, no pausing and then continuing on, only moving in a different direction.</p>
<p>Touching his things- his sweatshirt, his vintage sports magazines, his favorite watch now dusty and scratched, a master-level complex Rubik’s Cube they’d never been able to solve- didn’t bring him back. But there was something in the ritual, in the texture, that felt deeply important. He didn’t need Father’s Day to remember Ben. There was no forgetting him. But touching his things was grounding, a reminder, instead, that he too had once walked the Earth.</p>
<p>He pulled the Rubik’s Cube from the box, spinning it through his fingers. “I know you wouldn’t be jealous.” He twisted a row to the right. “So that’s why I don’t feel weird asking you.”</p>
<p>The wind came through his window where it was cracked. Drawings pinned to his bulletin board flapped with the breeze: A few designs for Spidey suits he’d once been working on, now long since abandoned. Some baseball tickets he and Ben once had for a future game. A poster urging entries to Stark Industries’ Innovation Competition.</p>
<p>“Do I even have a place to feel weird about this?” Peter frowned, rotating the cube back to the left, even though he was fairly certain that wasn’t within the algorithm. “He wasn’t my dad.” He spun the row back to the right. “Well. I guess technically you weren’t my dad either, but…but it’s still different.” He nearly had all the yellow lined up now, but that couldn’t be correct. “I don’t think you’d be jealous that I’m thinking of him today, but it still feels kinda wrong. I don’t know.”</p>
<p>Was it wrong? While the world outside mourned the death of Iron Man, Peter found himself missing someone different. Someone more human than a superhero made of iron. Mr. Stark had been more than his mentor, more than the ‘boss’ of a fake internship. Peter had died in his arms, been brought back by his sacrifices. And, yet, Tony’d had a family of his own. He was a father, and not to Peter. Was it wrong to claim him a role he had never formally stepped into? To mourn him on a day reserved for fathers, a day in which Peter already had two other men to mourn?</p>
<p>“No one ever tells you what it’s like,” he whispered to the Rubik’s Cube. “They didn’t tell me I’d turn to dust and then be brought back by someone only to barely get the chance to say hello, let alone goodbye.” His lips quirked, eyes pinching, but he didn’t cry. “No one ever tells you it’s complicated.”</p>
<p>The wind rifled the baseball tickets again, hard enough he grew scared they’d rip right off the wall. “Of course, I know you’d say it’s not complicated at all.” The wind died down, and he began turning the cube again, more rapidly this time. “You’d just say, ‘Pete. You love who you love. If Father’s Day was just about celebrating who made ya, the world’d be one hell of a boring place.’” He could remember the algorithm clearly now, clicking sides into place. “But, you know, he never said he loved me.”</p>
<p>He stared down at the cube, finally one turn away from solving it, and threw it back in the box. He was breathing hard, it was as though there was something squeezing him from the outside, panic and hurt and <em>wanting</em> all swirled into one. Was this what it was like to be loved? To feel Ben’s hand behind him guiding his bike as he rode without training wheels. His booming laugh as Peter tickled him in a sneak attack. The smile of pride at his report card, the declaration that ‘I’m going to have the smartest kid in New York!’ It was Tony’s face when, after a long session in the lab, Peter finally perfected the new web fluid. The way he fist-pumped him after a successful mission. His arms, fierce with longing, in the middle of a battlefield, holding Peter. His first grounding moment since taking the initial breaths of his second life. “I guess you’d say he already has.”</p>
<p>He reached down, scrambling the Rubik’s Cube. “And you’d say I have to push myself out of my comfort zone. So, this one’s for you.” He took a shaking breath, picking up his phone and scrolling through his contacts until he found the name ‘Pepper Potts.’</p>
<p>He bit his lip as he pressed call, trying to think of what he would say when she picked up. <em>Hey, it’s Peter. Yeah, Peter Parker as in Spider-Man.</em> No, that was weird, she already knew who he was. <em>Hi, I was just thinking about your late husband and- </em>No. <em>This may sound weird, but Mr. Stark was like a kinda-father to me-</em></p>
<p>The phone made a loud beeping noise. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please hang up or try again.”</p>
<p>Right. Those sorts of things happened after you’d been gone for five years and you came back to a phone whose numbers hadn’t changed even though the world had. He looked down at the screen, pausing before hitting another number.</p>
<p>This call rang through, and he waited through the dial tones before arriving at the answering machine.</p>
<p>“Hey, this is Tony. I’m assuming if you have this number you are either someone important, or you have hacked into my security system. If you are the former, please know I am probably up to something stupid but I’m sure I love you dearly and will get back to you as soon as I remember to check my phone. If you are the latter, feel free to give me your information because Stark Industries could definitely use someone in the security division who is this good at hacking. Peace.”</p>
<p>Peter missed Tony in the way one misses a dandelion. The promise of a wish, of something greater, of something better, something magical. The ache of never knowing whether it was you who blew the seeds or the wind, of never knowing if it mattered or not. Of tying your hopes to a fuzz, of knowing the second you blew, it would never come back again.</p>
<p>He had no grave to visit him at, no box to hold. Just an aching emptiness, the hole of a promise being ripped away too soon. The recently scabbed over kind of grief, which mourns not only the life, but the what could have been. What was to come.</p>
<p>He only had his two hands with which to grieve, and that would have to be enough.</p>
<p>Wooden legs carried him to his desk, and he opened the StarkPad box from where it had been collecting dust. It was sleek and beautiful looking- all soft lines and muted colors. It blinked to life as soon as he removed it from the box, unlocking after it scanned his face. Before he could choose any apps, however, the tablet flickered to a design page, where there was a note scrawled in Tony’s handwriting.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Hey kid.</p>
<p>If you’re looking at this, it means somehow our crazy plan worked, and you are back, and the world is in an okay enough place you can play around on a StarkPad. Not sure if that means I’m in the picture or no, but that doesn’t matter. What matter is you using that big brain of yours to make something really cool, okay? I’m talking fire-shooting gauntlets for Rhodey or a gigantic ball pit for Morgan. Hey, maybe we could even work on an upgrade for Spidey to get some new kicks.</p>
<p>You decide. You just gotta keep creating, okay? I trust you.</p>
<p>T.S.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The app flickered to life, bringing a holograph design of Spider-Man and Iron Man suits up before him. They were both redesigned in rainbow colors, and a text bubble popped up next to them: <em>Thinking about matching Pride suits for June? A little flashy, sure, but that’s my style, and we’d look dope as hell matching. (It is, as the kids say, dope as hell, right? I’m going to need you to keep filling me in on the lingo).</em></p>
<p>Peter huffed a laugh, rolling his eyes. And he started to create.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>it's been a hot sec since i've posted a fic, and my life is a bag of worms right now so i honestly just needed this release. im a lil rusty, but i'm hoping to post a bit more too (i'm thinking of maybe doing a post-endgame series of sorts? so if this fic/that concept interests you lmk).</p>
<p>i would love to hear what you thought in the comments below! everything from a novel to a keysmash is totally cool :) ik the world is rough rn but we're gonna make it through- there's still good out there. &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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